Temporarily Leaving WA after being choke slammed by a Panda

Last Update: June 20, 2012

Hey guys,

Thought it would be a fitting to have a Panda wave bye bye. It's put in a stranglehold that isn't going to be sorted any time soon.

As much as I'd love to stick around the WAU as it constantly evolves, I just can't do that at the moment. Some of you may recall the slap down I got when I got 36 sites de-indexed from Google. That's caused a lot of financial hardship with the revenue loss.

For the time being, it's not feasible for me to continue the membership when I'm not using it. The way the business is at the moment, I'm having to freelance to get the bills paid. So there's next to no time to keep up with WA training and apply the lessons to get back in the game.

I'm continuing to build a site though. I have myself down as a client. Not monetizing it yet until I get significant traffic. It's sitting #8 in search at the moment with only one link coming in from SA. Since I'm weary of my analytics account after being flagged, I'm putting a lot of content on the site before marketing it.

The freelance writing will keep me above the water for now. I reckon it should be around 6 months I'm going to be gone for.

I'll be back as Kyle and Carson are the only guys I like to take advice from. Especially now after the predicament I put myself in with other training programs that did fast track things but wasn't legitimate SEO. Little did I know about the Google webmaster guidelines. Which is well worth the read.

Anyhow, I've messaged Kyle to let him know the situation and now I'm dropping a note on the blog. Since I will be back at some point, I don't want people thinking I'm being ignorant and ignoring questions etc.

I'll catch you all when I get back.

All the best to everyone.
Robbie

PS...For those of you who didn't get a slap down and outsource article writing, I'm available at Elance.com. Here's my profile link. https://www.elance.com/s/robbie-b/ - Invite me on a project and tell me that WA sent ya over and I'll give you a discount that Elance clients won't. 8)

See the rest of you when I get back on my feet.

PPS...If your Birthday happens before I get back...Have a good one!

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Telmari Premium
Hey Robert!

Wow, 36 sites slapped is crazy. I can't imagine what that must be like. If you had to do the last few months/years all over again, what one thing do you think you'd have done differently?

Either way, sorry to see you go - and hope your freelancing goes well and that you get back in the game soon!
robert2704 Premium
Good question. Leave Google to figure out what the web pages are about since it's their core business. As an affiliate it should have been my job to bring people and products together. Not Google and websites together. I made the wrong move by matching keywords to search and not content to people. Lesson learned.
Telmari Premium
That is interesting! I always viewed it as helping Google bring you people to your websites where you can connect them with your products, helping your content stand out by using the keywords people search for. Are you saying you overoptimized on SEO and underdelivered on content? (Just curious! I'd love to learn more)
robert2704 Premium
Yeah. Listen to Kyle and Carson about SEO. (Jays summer of link building wabinar too.). It's signals that Google seems to be picking up on. FB likes, tweets, + 1s, your comments, your reach, who is linking into you and you're linking too. I should have seen from all those sites that they weren't getting any activity from users. Plenty of traffic from Google but nothing happening from the users being sent to the sites. So under delivering on content, I'd guess I'll be guilty as charged, as there were a few sites getting thousands of hits and no engagement with readers. That's just wrong!

On site stuff. When you have your keyword in the title, the URL, categories, tags, image alt attributes, your internal link titles etc. Some aren't apparent to people reading the content (like the alt attribute to your images), but when googlebots crawl a site, I guess it's going to be really keyword heavy. Then factor in the keyword anchor text from the off site stuff.

I guess that could be fall into the over optimization area.

Like I say, stick with these guys to learn all the kinks of this biz and stay away from SEO courses that give blueprints on how to rank. They can work but it's a sore hit when you get canned for it.

The site I'm building out slowly now is laryngitishomeremedies [org]. If you look at that site, you'll see how I'm trying to build it out without going heavy on backlinks.

Instead on each of the posts, I'm trying to encourage people to like, tweet, + 1, pin the images if that's what they prefer, and/or rate the content.

The site is still in its infancy and all I want to do is load it up with content that people are going to find useful. (hopefully). AdSense is a no go and there's only one product I see about it. I'm going to stick with this little site and blog on it whenever I have a bit of time on my hands.

I'm only focusing on content at the moment. Google is sending some traffic from the current #7 position it is I think? I'm not advertising on it though until there's enough people finding it and before I market it, I want to be confident that is worth while attracting people to the site.

The de-indexing of my sites wasn't solely to do with over optimizing. PPG explained it to me about AdSense. I run an auction with Flippa for one of them with live ads and she reckoned it's someone that click bombed it. That would have alerted Googles fraud squad, they'll have looked at my accounts and noticed the amount of sites, probably the keyword rich domains, the affiliate programs, the made for AdSense sites and just stopped investigating at some point, closed the case and annihilated every site I had.

Not to worry, I'll plod along and be back eventually. Thought I'd have heard back from Kyle or Carson before I went. Maybe their off playing golf.
veronica.l Premium
Come back soon Robert, good luck to you!!
robert2704 Premium
Will do Veronica and all the best with your local marketing. Stick with it.
muskyblood Premium
Hey Robert,

Sorry to hear you are leaving, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Hope to see you back sooner rather than later. Take care and good luck getting the ball rolling again!

Josh
robert2704 Premium
Thanks Josh. A saying from Kyle is sticking in my mind. Failure is a part of success. Just gotta learn from the mistakes, keep the chin up and keep plodding along. See ya when i get back.
Apina Premium
Ouch! Hope to see you back soon.
robert2704 Premium
Hi Dean, Hoping 6 months should get things done. See ya then.
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